When a ballplayer retires, that’s the time to make a final review of his stats, adding up his career runs, his strikeouts, his RBI’s and analyzing his more controversial plays.  So that’s what I find myself doing with my old friend Adrian Monk.  After 125 episodes, and nineteen novels, it looks like the man’s fabled career is coming to an end.  After this last novel, there will be no more Mr. Monk mysteries.  And I feel enormously lucky to have been part of it from beginning to end. Monk’s first “on-base” happened in the late 1990s, when producer David Hoberman saw the movie As Good as It Gets and thought, “Hmm, could that annoying guy with OCD (Jack Nicholson) be a police detective?  Would that make good TV?”  He took his questions to comedy giant Andy Breckman who answered yes and yes and wrote the pilot. After several years in development hell, Monk came to bat in 2002 and made an immediate hit, one of the first basic cable series to have any real impact.  It was so successful that ABC, then in a ratings slump, showed our reruns in prime time.  The following year, NBC did the same, filling…